Beverly Hills, CA: When NeXT announced their recent marketing shift toward custom-application development for large commercial clients, Alex Henry had the requisite next idea: a user group for those large corporate clients.

"System administration for large networks, software development concerns, hardware maintenance Ð all different levels of interaction are needed," said the director of MIS for the 310 NeXT machines at the William Morris Agency in Beverly Hills, California. "I have more common concerns with Rob [Wilen] in Chicago than with all the sysadmins at small sites in Southern California," he added.

Rob Wilen, vice-president of the office-automation group at SBC/OC in Chicago, agreed that "much of the informal networking has been geared toward the small site or the large academic installation."

"We need to make better use of what NeXT has to offer and help build some consensus as to what NeXT should do to better serve the needs of these [large commercial] customers," he said.

Henry reported that NeXT has, for its part, developed an advisory task force to look into the matter. The company also sponsored a dinner at NeXTWORLD Expo.

"Since these large sites can have networks scattered throughout the world, the workload for setting up this kind of group is far greater than setting up a local user group. It's not trivial," said Wilen.